Old Man Winter is here and showing off in full force, dumping snow on anything in his path. It’s time to bust out those snow gloves, boots and scarves and get ready to warm up with a nice hot cup of the latest Magento news. We’ve got lots to share including the upcoming Magento Enterprise Edition v1.7 Roadmap and the first beta release of Magento Community Edition v1.4.0.0. We’ve also got information about the upcoming webinar on Strategic E-Commerce: Making the Right Decisions and how Magento Connect continues to grow and help community members extend Magento with some great extensions. Finally, we’ll take a look at some of the latest Magento Videos and a great article at eCommerce Developer that explains the Customer Segmentation feature of Enterprise Edition v1.6. Let’s get to it.
Magento Enterprise Edition Version 1.7 Roadmap

Expected in Q4 2009, the next update to Magento Enterprise edition will offer some impressive features that continue to empower you to provide a superior online shopping experience for your customers. These new features include the new Reward Points System, and Performance Optimizations such as Highly Tuned Page Performance, Sales Report Performance Optimization, enhancements to our CMS+ Engine and much more along with additional features scheduled for 2010.

Click here to take a look at the roadmap and read more about the expected features in the upcoming version of Enterprise Edition.
Magento Community Edition Version 1.4.0.0-beta1 – Now Available!

Announced yesterday, the first beta version of Magento Community Edition is also available for download.

As this is a preview version it is NOT recommended in any way to be used in a production environment (more information about preview releases and the new community edition release process can be found in this blog post).

Some of the highlights for this release are theme fallback to the base theme (one level for all themes to start from), custom variables functionality for email templates, compatibility with Zend Framework version 1.9.4 and much more. To see a full list of features and fixed issues please visit our release notes page.

Magento Webinar: Strategic E-Commerce: Making the Right Decisions

We’ve got a great webinar coming up on December the 16th with Enterprise Partners One Pica on â€œStrategic E-Commerce: Making the Right Decisionsâ€, the first in a series of informational webinars entitled â€œCreating a Total E-Commerce Advantageâ€. Big opportunities emerge when you think beyond the platform to create a total online customer experience backed by sound strategy, creative marketing and actionable analytics.

In this webinar weâ€™ll explain how ultimate e-commerce success depends on correctly evaluating the role of an online channel in your overall business strategy and knowing how to capture value at every stage of the purchase cycle from marketing to transactions to service. For more information click here and click below to register for this not to be missed event.

Magento Connect continues its rapid growth and we are proud to announce that just a little before Thanksgiving day we reached over 1500 extensions! In case you arenâ€™t familiar with Magento Connect yet, Magento Connect is a marketplace for the distribution of community and commercial Magento products and services. Weâ€™re currently seeing close to a dozen extensions, themes, add-ons and enhancements being submitted to Magento Connect every day by community members just like you. Click here to read about some cool extensions that you may want to take a look at that provide some really neat extended functionality to your Magento shop.
More Magento Videos

More Magento Videos! Trapped in doors behind the mounds of snow? Can’t find anything useful on TV? We’ve got a great new video showing off some of the latest features in Magento Enterprise Edition v1.6 like Customer Segmentation, Targeted Marketing and our CMS+ Engine. Click to watch now.

We’ve also got a nice little video interview with Alex Ringsdorff of Enterprise Partner Visions New Media. We caught up with Alex at Meet Magento #2.09 a few weeks back to chat about how Visions is using Magento in some pretty innovative ways. Click here to watch the interview.
eCommerce Developer: Segmentation Made Simple

Are you considering or already running the new Magento Enterprise Edition v1.6? Are you taking advantage of the powerful Customer Segmentation features? If not, youâ€™re missing out on some great new functionality which can really help increase your conversions and average order value. If youâ€™re interested in learning about more this great new feature, then head over to eCommerce Developer where our Enterprise Partners Guidance have contributed a great introduction to what Customer Segmentation means and how you can take advantage of the powerful new targeted marketing tools in the latest version of Magento Enterprise Edition.